Dr. Gregory S. Sawicki is a Senior Research Scientist at IHMC helping to direct interdisciplinary teams focused on developing the next generation of wearable technology capable of augmenting human movement for people across the ability spectrum over their lifespan.

Sawicki’s home-base is at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, where he directs the Human Physiology of Wearable Robotics (PoWeR) laboratory. Sawicki has spent more than 15 years conducting research on the human side of the human-machine interface — combining tools from engineering, physiology and neuroscience to discover neuromechanical principles underpinning optimal locomotion performance and applying them to develop lower-limb robotic devices capable of improving both healthy and impaired human locomotion (e.g., for elite athletes, aging baby-boomers, post-stroke community ambulators).

Supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense, Sawicki and his group have published more than 60 papers [Google Scholar] with the goal to create a roadmap for the design of lower-limb robotic exoskeletons that are truly symbiotic. That is, wearable devices that work seamlessly in concert with the underlying physiological systems to facilitate the emergence of augmented human locomotion performance across time-scales spanning from milliseconds (i.e.,superhuman reflexes) to minutes (i.e., improved economy) to months (i.e., adapted musculoskeletal structures).

At Georgia Tech, Sawicki is an Associate Professor with appointments in the Schools of Mechanical Engineering and Biological Sciences and the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM). He holds a B.S. from Cornell University (’99) and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of California-Davis (’01). Dr. Sawicki completed a Ph.D. in Human Neuromechanics at the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor (‘07) and was an NIH-funded Post-Doctoral Fellow in Integrative Biology at Brown University (‘07-‘09). Dr. Sawicki was a faculty member in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State and UNC Chapel Hill from 2009-2017. In summer of 2017, he joined the faculty at Georgia Tech.

Outside the lab, Greg enjoys spending as much time as possible exploring the outdoors by hiking, biking, ski/snowboarding when in the North or West with his partner, Katia Koelle, (an infectious disease biologist), and his daughters, Elodie and Sonja. Greg also seeks live music experiences whenever possible and never misses a Phish concert within the radius of a single day’s drive.